Many businesses and business owners get bashed up for behind the game in the online world. I know,  I’ve done it. But sometimes it’s a bit unfair.  Then again, according to a recent survey, less than 16% of SMEs in Australia have some form of strategy for the digital activities of their business.   The [...]

If you want a quick snapshot of SEO and the factors that are important, then wrap your head around the new Periodic Table infographic  (see below) from the guys at Search Engine Land. The factors are set out in the form of the Periodic Table you may remember from your high school chemistry lessons. (If [...]

Finding smarter ways to successfully combine  online commerce with social networking is one of the holy grails of many businesses today.  Here’s how eBay are doing it…  What can you learn? A recent FastCompany article on smarter e-Commerce includes eBay’s new ‘Help Me Shop’ browser plug-in. According to eBay’s website, ‘Help Me Shop is a [...]

The new social gifting service from Wrapp.com was given a good rapp in an article published yesterday in Ragtrader.com.au. Wrapp is a new service that allows users to give their Facebook friends free gift cards made available by retailers using Wrapp. You can read the full article here at Ragtrader. Wrapp is a new service [...]

In this day and age, can the little guy still take on and beat the big guys?  Here’s a new take on an inspiring story of a struggling retailer who fought off a global chain, re-established his niche and his failing business – and made international headlines. This case study called “Creating Buzz for your [...]

Can your business use online video more effectively?  What can you learn from business organizations that the guys at Google think are doing it well? Google’s latest Official Blog post talks about the launch of a new program for its new “YouTube Marketing Ambassadors”. These are, as Google puts it,  a “group of outstanding organizations [...]

Can Pinterest work for business? I’ve been wondering about this. Then I came across a report on Bizrate Insights about Pinterest and other image sharing sites, saying 1 in 4 online buyers buy after seeing an image on these sites.  I found it astonishing. And unbelievable. There has to be more to it… Here’s a quote from [...]

As business owners, we want feedback from our customers, right? And we think we always want positive feedback, right? Positive feedback is great. But it often ain’t the truth, and imho, it doesn’t really help us adapt, improve and grow. Sure we want to know the things we are doing right, but in my experience [...]

If you are wondering about the growth in mobile and whether to embrace mobile in your business planning, you need to check out some of the info in this latest report from Cisco. It’s a Cisco Public white paper called “Cisco Visual Networking Index: Global Mobile Data Traffic Forecast Update, 2011–2016“.   (And many thanks to Peter [...]

My old friend,  trainer and motivator Brian Leaning-Mizen had this little story amongst the gems in his newsletter this morning.  I like it – and wanted to share it here. An aging Bhuddist master grew weary of his apprentice, constantly complaining about his life, so one morning, he instructed the unhappy young man to put [...]

Have you ever wondered how the ‘digital native’ kids of today will grow up to do business online in the future? What will they expect? What will they demand? These kids have grown up to assume that all this online stuff is natural and normal. Just as anyone born after 1969 knew that “of course, [...]

If you are a merchant with a PayPal account, you can now start to take payments from your customers using your iPhone and a credit card swipe reader.  It could be a smarter way to do business… Here’s the story from the SmartCompany website.